Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, 72, has expressed “deep concern” about the streaming rollout of Musk, his new four-hour documentary chronicling Elon Musk’s descent into corruption.
HBO Max plans to stream the film after its October theatrical release. However, Paramount’s ongoing battle to overtake Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, may lead David Ellison’s MAGA-friendly platform to censor Musk, Gibney said at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday.
“I do worry about the storm clouds on the horizon and the fact that [HBO is] in the midst of a takeover battle by Paramount,” Gibney said during a keynote conversation at the festival. “Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter. And his son David Ellison has shown he’ll twist whatever facts are at his disposal in order to please the Capo dei Capi, who happens to be the president of the United States.”
Musk premiered on Sept. 8 at the Venice International Film Festival to positive reviews and a surge of newfound concern over the tech billionaire’s unchecked power. Musk has threatened to sue the production, calling it a “hit piece”. The documentary’s production team has asserted Gibney’s “journalistic integrity” (Gibney is an Oscar-winning investigative documentarian) and defended “the right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures,” Jigsaw Productions wrote in a statement responding to lawsuit threats.
Paramount’s forceful effort to subsume Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion is just one of Ellison’s major MAGA moves since Skydance, his Trumpy entertainment company, merged with Paramount in August 2025; Paramount’s cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Bari Weiss’ overhaul of 60 Minutes are two examples of Ellison’s drastic appeals to Trump, 80.
A Paramount shareholder has already sued Ellison, 43, and his tech billionaire father, Larry, 82, alleging they promised “illegal private benefits to President Trump in order to remove federal regulatory barriers” and the removal of CNN anchors Trump doesn’t like after the Warner Bros. merger.
If Paramount merges with Warner Bros., Gibney suspects more censorship could follow, including that of his film, which depicts Musk’s efforts to help Trump win the 2024 presidential election.
“You’ve got a con artist who has put in the White House another con artist,” Gibney said of Musk, 55, and Trump. “And they just keep running bigger and bigger cons, because there’s no Department of Justice or FBI to tell them to do otherwise.”
Now, Gibney is apprehensive that the Ellisons would pull Musk from streaming.
“So that is a deep concern, but so far, so good,” Gibney said, adding, “It’s a great concern, and the consolidation of the media and also the aggressive editorial takeover of the media by the tech barons is really deeply concerning.”
